Gender Roles In Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart

Gender Roles in Things Fall Apart: An essay

Patriarchy and gender roles have not just been a thing of a past. They still exist both in the modern world as well as developing countries. In the novel, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, the Ibo people’s patriarchal society has a strict structure of behavioral expectations according to gender. Men are expected to remain hard-working and aggressive throughout their life, while women are to stay submissive and yielding to their male counterparts. The novel’s main character, Okonkwo, is obsessed in proving his strength as a man, which proves that he fits the role of a proper man in the Ibo tribe.

Even as a young boy, Okonkwo had already started to despise his father’s weakness. Especially after Okonkwo’s playmate had called Unoka Agbala, or another name for women, “Okonkwo was ruled by one passion—to hate everything that

his father Unoka had loved. One of these things was gentleness and another was idleness” (Achebe 13). The story of Agbala reveals the origin as well as the reason, of Okonkwo’s obsession with strength—the shame he felt when his playmate had taunted Unoka’s failure and femininity.
At one point, Okonkwo fears so much of being thought weak or unfit of maintaining the leadership position of the Egwugwu, that when Ikemefuna cried out for Okonkwo to save him, “Okonkwo drew his machete and cut [Ikemefuna] down. He was afraid of being thought weak” (Achebe 61). Okonkwo fears losing his masculinity, and so without giving it a second thought, Okonkwo lands the killing blow on Ikemefuna. Ironically, Okonkwo is so good at fulfilling his gender role, he ends up defying societal norms just to prove it.
Once Okonkwo returns from exile, he finds that he is one of the few clan members left who still uphold Umuofia’s initial behavioral expectations for men and women, on account of the missionaries having introduced completely new customs. This causes Okonkwo to be “deeply grieved. And it was not just personal grief. He mourned for the clan, which he saw breaking up and falling apart, and he mourned the warlike men of Umuofia, who had unaccountably become soft like women” (Achebe 183). All the way until his death, Okonkwo maintains his aggressive and controlling nature, even when it seems that he is the only one in his clan left who abides by the customary gender roles of Umuofia before the white men arrived. This also foreshadows that because Okonkwo is not happy with the way his clan is operating, he will resist the evangelists and their government.
Okonkwo’s fear of weakness and failure is what ultimately leads to his fall from power.

Due to this fear, Okonkwo is unwilling to conform to the changes of Umuofia once the missionaries arrive. Okonkwo is incapable of self-acceptance. He bases his success and failure on his father’s and successively puts those same pressures on his children, leading Nwoye to hate his own father. Okonkwo cannot cope with the evolution of the tribe and village when the white men arrive which eventually makes his world “fall apart.” He feels he has no place in the “new” village and the old traditions are as unnecessary as he is. Since Okonkwo measures himself and others by standards that are no longer valid, he feels unimportant, which led him to commit suicide. Okonkwo fulfills his gender expectations in the society effectively by repeatedly demonstrating his assertive nature and proving his masculinity, which shows beyond doubt that he possesses the perfect and ideal nature of the standard Ibo man. Nevertheless, as the society changes, as well as its expectations, Okonkwo fails to do so, leading to his eventual

demise.